Another management change at Flipkart as legal head Rajinder Sharma quits

“The company has already communicated to its top managers that Sharma is leaving the company,” a person familiar with the development said.Aditi Shrivastava&Richa Maheshwari | ET Bureau | Updated: July 05, 2016, 12:45 IST

BENGALURU: Flipkart’s legal head Rajinder Sharma has quit, just 10 months after joining India’s top ecommerce firm that is battling for market domination with US giant Amazon.

“The company has already communicated to its top managers that Sharma is leaving the company,” a person familiar with the development said.

Flipkart confirmed the development without giving any specific details. Sharma, who was reporting to Flipkart CEO Binny Bansal, had joined the Bengaluru-based company in September 2015.

Sharma, who has earlier worked with Samsung, Reliance ADAG, JSW Group and Tata Group, said he has yet to finalise his next move as a professional. “That's work in progress but not formalised. Will be so finalised next week for sure as I am travelling for two days,” he told ET over a text message.

“The going has been good and Flipkart legal team won an international award as second best in Asia Pacific, adjudged by a jury of Global GCS; so not a right time for me to leave yet though,” he added.

Sharma’s exit comes at a time when Flipkart has to tackle new regulations governing online marketplaces.

When Sharma had come on board, following the exit of general counsel Srivals Kumar, Flipkart had said he will be responsible for handling legal compliances and regulatory issues, comprising of “corporate secretarial practices, contract management, litigation management, compliance management and protection of intellectual property rights of all the group companies”.

Flipkart has been seeing constant changes in its top management in recent times, starting with commerce platform head and Myntra founder Mukesh Bansal leaving with chief business officer Ankit Nagori in February.

After that, chief product officer Punit Soni, one of its prized hires from Silicon Valley, and seller marketplace and ecosystem head Manish Maheshwari have also left.

Besides the exits, Flipkart has rejigged top teams of its commerce unit and technology team multiple times.

It recently roped in former executive Kalyan Krishnamurthy as head of category management a few months after it had given additional responsibility of category management to chief marketing officer Samardeep Subandh, who joined the firm from Marico in December 2015.

Flipkart has also changed reporting structure of its technology team as chief technology officer Peeyush Ranjan has moved back to Silicon Valley due to personal reasons.

In March, Ranjan was put in charge of all engineering teams as group chief technology officer, with supply chain head Hari Vasudev also reporting to him.

But Flipkart hired former Micromax and Amazon executive Ashish Agarwal as senior vice president engineering last month, and both Vasudev and Agarwal now report to CEO Bansal.